E624 | EUCVC Summit 2025: Bodil Sidén, Kost Capital & Marika King, PINC: Feeding the world

0:00By 2050, we'll need to feed 10 billion people without destroying the planet. This calls for ag tech, food tech, and bold innovation in how we grow, move, and eat. Bodil Seiden of Cost Capital and Marika King of Pink, Polyx CVC, share their investment theses in conversation with Jeppe on where Europe's smartest food bets are being made. We're shaking it up a little bit. We're standing up. If you feel like standing up, you can do the same. But it's just shaking it up, right? Here we go live, right? Bodil, you have launched Cost Capital to fund better food for more people, leveraging both a VC fund but also a test kitchen.

0:45How is that dual structure helping you? I mean, food is so different. We have to eat it, it's culture, it's so many elements that you can't just sit in a spreadsheet and sort of make a few sort of breaths. So we decided to have our own studio. We have a Michelin chef on the team, a gastrophysicist. We even have a food historian because there's quite a lot of regulatory stuff around food. So you should come and visit us in Fredericks Bay. We have a test kitchen. Every time I get my morning coffee, there's something being fermented on the stove. It's pretty awesome. So we're basically rethinking the venture model because food is basically different.

1:25Yeah. Marika, welcome. Thank you. PINK invests from within Paulik's deep operational capabilities, right? And for me, Paulik is Santa Maria Dordelia Gibbs. That's how I go about it, right? How does acting both as a strategic partner and a venture investor enable meaningful acceleration for you? Yeah. So when PINK was launched in 2018, one of the reasons was that we were going to speed up innovation in the mothership. And I thought, how the hell are we going to make that happen? But the truth is that it actually works. And it's fascinating to watch. And I think the reason is that, you know, whenever we come as a bench unit to say to the core, oh, can you please help evaluate this startup?

2:13You know, we want an answer within three weeks, not two years that it normally takes, which means that it actually speeds it up. So that's pretty cool. And then, of course, when we invest, we don't invest in all the stuff that we look at. when you have invested, there is a stronger commitment to collaborate. And oftentimes that means that we become a customer, which is, of course, super valuable to the startup, but it also helps the adoption of all the impact that we want to see because we only invest in impact-related sort of cutting-edge technologies. Yeah. Keeping it with you, Marika. Yeah.

2:49Some of our early discussions when I worked as a CVC was also how to set up, right? You have ended up with an evergreen fund. Yeah. How does that help you play the long game? I mean, it does help in the kind of sense that we have more flexibility than the standard VC model. Because in particular, we don't have after two years to say, oh, we don't do early stage investing anymore because we're at the end of our fund cycle. Having said that, I mean, we co-invest with VCs the whole time. And we need to be aligned with those guys and the startups. We also, I mean, to be fair, have to get some exits at some point.

3:26We're just in our second five year mandate. And if we don't see any exit within those five years, you know, I will be one of the ones looking for jobs. So I think that's pretty fair to say. You can join us. Yeah. Bovil, you have said, you know, under promise over deliver. And you favor founders that, you know, truly execute, you know. What do you look for in those founders? Right? I mean, it's easy to say. as a VC, as a fat cat sitting and sort of having, but sort of, I think execution is really key. I'm not a big fan of sort of the perfect idea or like we could steal the idea, but building companies, that is execution.

4:03And I think I haven't met a founder still that have focused too much on the market or too much on the customers. It's always that the product gets too obsessed about and you go to market way too late. I had a little bit of a few weeks off this summer. It was nice, but that always leads to weird ideas. And I like consumer and I like fashion. So I sort of started talking to my friends about what if I maybe should produce these watch rings? If you remember them from the 90s, you have a little analog watch and it looks like a ring. It's pretty cool in Gen Z. And I think all of my friends shot it down after like one second.

4:40No demand. If I would ask you to raise your hand, if you would buy a watch ring, I'm not sure you would actually do it. So I think that's sort of a good way to start about it and sort of ask your customers, go out, be obsessed, iterate your product. And the founders that do that, I think you can spot that pretty, pretty early. Can you share a little bit of the secret sauce from Cost Capital, right? Because you have that test kitchen. So how is due diligence on the product? Is that, you know, diceffering the product, looking what's in, you know, tasting? Is that how you go about it? I mean, I started business and I'm very comfortable in like Excel and all of that.

5:15but sort of when it comes to food engineering, like enzymes and strains and stuff, people can tell me basically anything and it would be quite difficult to make the diligence. But if they sort of have Luisa in the same room, who's our food scientist, she can easily within two questions validate whether this is bullshit or if it's the real deal. So from like a product standpoint, that is extremely valuable. And I also think for the founders, I mean, we overpromise a lot as VCs and we always get the deal and then sort of when the deal is done, sometimes a few VCs disappear. But our studio can also add sort of value post investment and really help out with sort of product application and development and also sort of connecting to corporates like Marika.

6:01I was just going to say it's a bit similar because we have a corporate who kind of maybe serve with some of that. Exactly. So, you know, both before the investment, but also after. And I think for us, I mean, working with partners like Marika, I think CBC sometimes get a little bit of a bad reputation. I think that because some sort of investment managers have been a little bit too greedy on the terms, they want to have like exclusivity and stuff. But there are actually really good ones. And I think for us, it's really, really nice to have Marika to validate like, OK, what does actually Paul think about this?

6:31Is there a demand? So if it's pre-seed, that's also a way of sort of exploring whether there's actually demand for a product. Marike, what are you looking for at the moment? What is the most urgent opportunities right now as you see it? Yeah, because we're sort of impact driven, but also obviously financially driven and strategically. But these are the three things we're dealing with. I mean, food system is like 25 % of climate emissions. Not a lot of people know that. So when you talk about climate tech, a lot of people talk about energy and whatnot, but they forget about food. So all the climate people, please think about agri-food.

7:07So there's also two resources that we really really have to be careful about and that is soil and water. So sustainable agriculture at the root we are looking for supporting green fertilizers, biocontrols to get rid of the chemicals, you know looking at smart water solutions, stuff like that. And if I can mention one more because I know our time is limited I could talk about this forever because we look pretty broad across the whole agri-food value chain but like the company that can invent the plastics that is not plastics so for packaging you know the material that acts and functions like plastic in terms of circularity but is actually biodegradable that is the holy grail of food packaging.

7:51Odile during the past week you released your latest investment in MS Danish. Danish AI of course yes but what's next you know is that still where you are, what are you looking into? I mean, I think the whole AI space and the enabling technology space is super important for food because food is you put an ingredient in the steel tech and then you wait for the lab and then it fails and then you do it again. And that's why it's quite costly and why it's difficult to get the unit economics to work. If you have more of enabling tech and smarter equipment, but also more data drivenness, you could develop those trends maybe digitally and then test them.

8:25So I think it is a huge opportunity and you should check out Amass, Everyone working with sort of bio life science, super cool product. But I'm also very passionate about sort of the sort of intersection of food and nutrition or health. And I think we're all much more aware of sort of what we should eat and what nutrients we lack and so on. And I think to enable the building blocks that can provide fatty acids or antioxidants or the sort of vitamins we need, that will also be key. And do them in a more sustainable way. Because did you know that aromas and stuff like that is typically done with fossil fuels?

9:00It's just mind-boggling, the stuff you don't know about actually what you put in your mouth. So you can do those instead with enzymes and those kinds of beautiful things that you're very good at in Denmark, by the way. We're Swedish, but we like Denmark. We love having Swedes in Denmark also. So thank you for being here. And thank you for contributing. Thank you.